Rethinking "quality" cinema (original) (raw)
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Between Art and Commerce: The Semprún Decree and the New Spanish Cinema of the 1990s
Hispanic Research Journal, Volume 20, Issue 2, 2019
This article explores an overlooked piece of legislation in the history of contemporary Spanish cinema: the so-called Semprún Decree. While the popularly known as Miró Law has been widely studied, the Decree passed by Jorge Semprún in 1989 in his position as Minister of Culture (1988–91) has barely been analysed; this scarcity of historiography is quite surprising, since the Decree was not only designed to change the funding policies established by the Miró Law, but it also set the model for the forthcoming pieces of legislation that had been regulating the Spanish film industry up to the 2000s. Therefore, this article explains the key role that the Semprún Decree had in the reconfiguration of the Spanish film policies of the 1990s by framing it within the wider context of the European film policies of the period.
Spain on screen : developments in contemporary Spanish cinema
2011
The title of the first of these books, Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema is slightly misleading, because it is not really about the representation of Spain on screen, nor (with the exception of contributions by Rob Stone and Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla) is it really about developments in contemporary Spanish cinema. It is, though, a useful and diverse collection of essays from major scholars in the field that opens with Barry Jordan on debates surrounding the ratification of the 2007 Ley de cine. Jordan has an acute eye for industrial concerns and although his subtitle 'the death of Spanish cinema' seems slightly premature, the fact that government funding should be monitored is an important point well made. Rob Stone provides a welcome antidote to
Cinema Serving the Nation. Spanish feature films from 1939 to 1975
Cinema deserves a great deal of attention from those who study the creation of the nation and its identity in the 20th century, since it has been the most powerful tool for cultural dissemination and homogenization during that century. In this particular case, the films produced between 1939 and 1975 -Francoist regime- were controlled by a dictatorial and authoritarian regime through censorship, repression and funding. Nonetheless, we have not studied films stemmed from power, that is, the propaganda, but the national images that were screened. After watching more than four hundred and fifty films, we have concluded that in the feature films under study, there is an unquestionable nationalist discourse, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the film. This discourse is focused on six main subjects: the origins and splendour of Spain, the defensive wars, the expansionist Spain, the Catholic Spain, the romantic-folkloric Spain and the modern Spain. We will develop these different images, studying which ones were directly promoted by the regime with the purpose of being legitimated and which of them were made up of a way of understanding Spain that had already permeated society. We will also see to what extent the discourse is affected by the changes occurred during the regime, if new national images have been created and what is to be done with the previous ones. This conference took place in Cañada Blanch Center (London School of Economics and Politics) in 2017
En: François de la Bretèque (ed). “les Cinemas Peripheriques dans la Periode des Premiers Temps/Peripheral Early Cinema” . Perpignan, 17-22 Junio de 2008. Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan , 2010. Pp. 347-358., 2010
Las formas fílmicas y las prácticas cinematográficas del llamado “cine primitivo” están marcadas —desde su origen como un ámbito académico (Congreso de Brigthon, 1978)— por su estudio y análisis como parte del proceso de institucionalización de un nuevo campo cultural. Ahora bien, dos décadas después de aquella histórica fecha no hemos sido capaces de unir en un solo relato las dos grandes tramas que conforman la transformación de los cines primitivos en el sistema institucional del cine. Nos falta así un modelo que unifique la doble perspectiva que se aplica generalmente a la invención y definición de los media: el análisis historiográfico del «surgimiento tecnológico de la novedad y el estudio sociológico de la «construcción social del medio». Este problema epistemológico es explorado en este trabajo a través del análisis de un caso excéntrico: la percepción cultural del cinema en Madrid, entre 1903 y 1913, a partir de la disparidad, en la prensa de la época, entre el artefacto y la maravilla del «cinematógrafo» y el local y el espectáculo del «ciné».
Studies in European Cinema, 2012
This article focuses on the development of film workshops in Spain. In particular, it examines their importance in Spanish film culture during the last years of Franco’s dictatorship and follows them up until the early years of the democratic regime. Thus, the essay undertakes three tasks: first, to map out the development of film workshops in Spain during the 1970s, trying to trace their fragmentary and highly-dispersed history; second, to examine the film practices of La Central del Curt and the Cooperativa de Cinema Alternatiu as main examples of these organizations and, third, to contextualize these proposals in the uneven field of transitional cultural practices, considering them a challenge to theoretical and methodological questions in the study of minor cinemas.
Cinema and Television in the Transition
The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model, eds. Diego Muro and Gregorio Alonso (New York: Routledge,), pp. 199-214., 2011
This article offers a survey of cinema and television during the Spanish Transition to democracy. It makes four observations: that industrial factors must be considered with formal or ideological ones; that far from colluding in a 'pact of oblivion' cinema in the period is intimately engaged with history; that cinema is inextricable from television, a medium vital for historical memory but often neglected; and finally that screen narrative must be examined in formal terms, as well for its content. The case studies of the article are Víctor Erice's much praised art movie El espíritu de la colmena and Antonio Mercero's much loved TV series Crónicas de un pueblo, both of which contain key scenes of rural pedagogy in the Francoist period.
Communication & Society, 2019
The films produced during the political transition to democracy in Spain continue to capture the interest of film analysts and historians. However, beyond the realm of fiction films, there are still many areas that have received little attention, such as the attempts to develop newsreels for cinemas once the monopoly of the Francoist No-Do newsreels had ended. This study focuses on the Noticiari de Barcelona newsreel series produced between 1977 and 1980, specifically analysing its content and its discourse. The importance of this newsreel series lies in three main factors: because it constituted one of the first steps towards the development of a Catalan film industry after the end of the dictatorship (in the midst of a debate in Spain over the need to establish autonomous film industries for each of the country’s different regions); because of the attempt it constituted to establish a local audiovisual news product in clear opposition to the No-Do newsreels; and because of its adoption of some of the themes, discursive strategies and objectives attributed to many of the independent political films of the period. All of these factors determined the content and discourse of the newsreels, and gave them an orientation that was more persuasive than strictly informative. Keywords Newsreels, audiovisual information, persuasion, Institut de Cinema Català, independent cinema.
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2014
In the story of the fight for democratic freedom and the drive to bring Europe and the world closer to Francoist Spain, Nuevo Fotogramas deserves a central position. Fuelled by the spirit of May 1968, the long-running Barcelona-based magazine Fotogramas became Nuevo Fotogramas (NF) in 1968 and set out to define the pro-democracy struggle differently from the Madrid-based film cultures. It also set out to engage with European cultural production as if censorship and being closed off from European modernity were simply temporary situations. NF helps us to write the transition differently, by debunking the myth of its having been a process led solely by the filmmakers and critics who engaged in direct confrontation. Explaining the different approach that NF had to documenting and taking part in the cultural industries of the transition helps us to locate resistance in the “trivial” and “female” world of consumption rather than exclusively in the production sector, more associated with visible and well-documented acts of opposition. Three aspects of the magazine contribute to this reconfiguration of inherited ideas about the transition, particularly the ethos of the publication, the writers who collaborated in it, and what seems to be more “marginalia”: its letter section, “El consultorio de Mr. Belvedere,” and its advertisements.